Facebook says that from next year on, it will cut adverts masquerading as news posts to improve the user experience – likely forcing corporations to stump up more cash for actual ads.

“Our goal with News Feed has always been to show people the
things they want to see,” said a statement from the
California-based company, which has recently been flirting with
all-time market cap records, and is currently valued at $207
billion.

“People told us they wanted to see more stories from friends
and Pages they care about, and less promotional content,” it
said.

When a typical user – with the average amount of friends and
frequency of visits – logs into Facebook, he likely has more than
1,500 new items the company can display in his aggregated news
feed. Those range from friends’ news to pages the user has
‘liked.'

This is more than one person will likely read, and Facebook has
permanently been playing with the algorithm to produce the most
lucrative and satisfying selection for its 1.35-billion user
base, particularly as users complain that their feed is cluttered
with ads for irrelevant items.

“What we discovered is that a lot of the content people see
as too promotional is posts from Pages they like, rather than
ads. This may seem counterintuitive but it actually makes sense:
News Feed has controls for the number of ads a person sees and
for the quality of those ads (based on engagement, hiding ads,
etc.), but those same controls haven’t been as closely monitored
for promotional Page posts,” said Facebook.

On this basis, Facebook has created new criteria for ads that
will be culled, which includes the following:

1. Posts that solely push people to buy a
product or install an app
2. Posts that push people to enter promotions
and sweepstakes with no real context
3. Posts that reuse the exact same content from
ads

“Brands with high-quality content, like Red Bull, or ones
with high engagement, like Harley-Davidson, will still reach
their fans,” Jan Rezab, chief executive of Socialbakers, a
web analytics firm, assured The New York Times.

Yet experts believe that while the number of ‘advertorial’ posts
will fall, the number of ads, albeit clearly marked, will
inevitably rise.
“It’s a clear message to brands: If you want to sound like an
advertiser, buy an ad,” said Rebecca Lieb, a digital
advertising and media analyst at the Altimeter Group.

In the third quarter, Facebook received 64 percent higher
advertising revenues – totaling $2.96 billion – than in the
previous three months, and said that overall, its ad prices have
gone up by 274 percent in the past year.

Some popular Facebook page owners are also afraid that their
posts will be weeded out by the site's sledgehammer algorithms,
and crowded out by other types of posts.

“I understand that FB has to make money, especially now that
it is public, but in my view this development turns the notion of
'fans' on its head,” George Takei, the Star Trek actor and
meme sharer with more than eight million fans, said on his
Facebook page.

Yet whatever it does, Facebook, unrivaled in its size, is still
likely to come up trumps.

“They are sitting on such a wealth of data to be able to
target effectively. They have dominance in the kind of products
they are offering the market,” said Jordan Bitterman, chief
strategy officer for North America for Mindshare, a digital
advertising agency.